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In Canada, Pipeline Remarks Stir Analysis

OTTAWA — Perhaps it was his choice of words, but a small portion of President Obama’s speech about climate change on Tuesday has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in Canada.

At issue are his remarks about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would send bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. The pipeline requires presidential approval and, for Canadians at least, has become a dominant political issue.

“Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be in our nation’s interests,” Mr. Obama said at Georgetown University. “Our national interest would be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”

The remarks were immediately parsed by supporters and opponents looking for any indication of the eventual decision.

But many leaders of Canada’s oil and gas industry had a very different take, despite Ms. McEachern’s assertion that the president had sent “shock waves” through the industry.

“Our reading is that this is a positive step in the process,” said Greg Stringham, an official at the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the trade group that includes the major oil sands operators.

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Mr. Stringham and others in the industry, including Russ Girling, the president and chief executive of TransCanada, the company in Calgary behind the pipeline, base their optimism on a State Department report released this year that concluded that the $7 billion pipeline would not substantially increase the rate of oil sands development and, in turn, the carbon they emit. For Mr. Obama to say that the pipeline must not “significantly exacerbate” carbon pollution, they say, only helps their case.

Much attention in Canada focused on the president’s description of the Alberta energy reserves as the “tar sands.” In Canada, tar sands is a politically charged term, used mainly by environmentalists and avoided by politicians and even some environmentalists who want to avoid seeming excessively rhetorical.

The Globe and Mail provided a small history of the two terms in a front-page article about the speech, which said that the president had “used the language of the project’s critics.”

But Nathan Lemphers, a senior policy analyst with the Pembina Institute, a environmental group based in Calgary, said he was not sure that Mr. Obama’s choice of words was filled with deep meaning. “Most Americans aren’t as sensitive as Canadians about the ideology behind those two terms,” he said.

Even Mr. Stringham said that when he first began his career, the oil industry used tar sands. Given that the sands are not mixed with oil or tar, which is an artificial substance, but bitumen, Mr. Stringham said the most accurate phrase might be “bituminous sands,” although he acknowledged that it was unlikely to catch on.

A version of this article appears in print on June 27, 2013, on Page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: In Canada, Pipeline Remarks Stir Analysis. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe